Voice of VOIPSA

This is a guest post from Andy Zmolek, Senior Manager, Security Planning and Strategy at Avaya, and past participant in VOIPSEC mailing list discussions and other VOIPSA activities. Andy asked if I could publicize this because he believes it is a discussion which we in the security community need to have.

Text by Andy Zmolek of Avaya:

Is it appropriate for a security research firm to require payment from a product vendor prior to detailed vulnerability disclosure? I received the following notification this morning from the CEO of a VoIP security startup:

“I wanted to inform you that VoIPshield is making significant changes to its Vulnerabilities Disclosure Policy to VoIP products vendors. Effective immediately, we will no longer make voluntary disclosures of vulnerabilities to Avaya or any other vendor. Instead, the results of the vulnerability research performed by VoIPshield Labs, including technical descriptions, exploit code and other elements necessary to recreate and test the vulnerabilities in your lab, is available to be licensed from VoIPshield for use by Avaya on an annual subscription basis.

“It is VoIPshield’s intention to continue to disclose all vulnerabilities to the public at a summary level, in a manner similar to what we’ve done in the past. We will also make more detailed vulnerability information available to enterprise security professionals, and even more detailed information available to security products companies, both for an annual subscription fee.”

I would like to solicit opinions about what appears to me to be a new challenge to infosec industry best practices. For those of you who work for software or equipment vendors, have you ever received similar notices from legitimate security researchers? Does anyone here believe the practice of equipment vendors making payments to security researchers in order to receive details about potential exploits is an acceptable business practice?

For infosec professionals, would you be comfortable purchasing services from a security research firm that follows such a policy?

NOTE from Dan York: In an effort to get VoIPshield’s perspective, I attempted to reach CEO Rick Dalmazzi but could only get his voicemail. (Perhaps because it is Canada Day and they are in Ottawa.) Andy Zmolek informed me on a call today that he had emailed Rick this morning asking when VoIPShield would be updating their Vendor Disclosure Policy (dated Nov 2007) that is on their Vulnerability Advisories page, as this email from Rick represents a significant departure from that stated policy. I also called the number of the PR contact listed on VoIPShield’s website but that extension went to a “general delivery” mailbox.

This post will be updated with information from VoIPShield Systems when such information can be obtained.

Technorati Tags:
voip, security, voipsecurity, voipshield, avaya

On a lightning visit to the Infosec show in London, I chanced to meet with Ari Takanen of Codenomicon (fuzzing and quality assurance experts). Ari has a new book out: “Fuzzing for Software Security Testing and Quality Assurance”, from Artech House, available at Amazon.com and (as they say) all good bookstores. Of course, just because there’s a credit crunch doesn’t mean that security is any less of a problem, and it doesn’t mean that software defects are any the better. It sounds like Codenomicon have a pretty good market niche.

Facetime were talking about their new Unfied Security Gateway. This appliance goes beyond URL blocking and reporting, and implements reporting for VoIP and Skype, and the whole range of IM and P2P applications. In addition they have some pretty granular tools for finding out what the usage of social sites like Facebook (FB) and Myspace, and the resulting bandwidth usage might be. You can even drill down into the subsections being used (apps, music etc), which will be useful as increasingly FB is used for legitimate messaging and networking purposes in business. Facetime’s “special guest” on the stand was an original Engima encryption device, brought down from Bletchley Park (a.k.a “Station X”), the UK’s premier code-breaking museum. This is a refurbished and fully working Enigma, and on the Facetime stand they were even allowing us to have a go. I can report that it is satisfyingly mechanical to use.

AEP were also there showing some high-grade encryption equipment for enabling remote sites with access to secure systems. Law enforcement and government customers have a legal duty to protect the data that they handle, which and even remote users (or temporary sites) must protect data from snooping. Data at rest is a particular risk, and UK government agencies have embarrassingly lost large numbers of laptops and pen drives in recent years. It’s safer to leave the data in the secure site (rather than the USB stick) and access it over secure links when needed. The AEP solution fits into a laptop bag, and enables a team of people to share secure data and VoIP links to a central site, routed over any convenient satellite, 3G or WAN links.

The Infosec show is still on today and tomorrow at Earls Court exhibition centre in London.

Verizon recently released its data breach report for 2009. I was interested in reading this as I still have the 2008 report. What better way to educate yourself on trends, good or bad, then comparing historical data when someone else is taking the time to do the work for you? Quickly comparing the two reports I was surprised to find very little appears to have changed. I was hoping to see improvements in increased awareness, improved processes mitigating attacks and possible new attack vectors due to this vigilance, but unfortunately this was not the case. The most telling was the section regarding attack difficulty. In 2008 approximately 55% of attacks required no skill or that of a ‘script kiddie’. In 2009 this total number decreased to 52% but surprisingly there was an increase in the ‘no skill’ needed – from 3% to 10%. Based on this report it appears that security professionals are not getting the message across regarding the basics of securing systems. Now I understand that this is one report from one vendor but Verizon is a known name as a provider. You have to assume they respond to and investigate claims by customers with their service offerings and the report should carry some weight regarding security threats and trends. One wonders if this report opens a window to the current state of VoIP security. Even during difficult economic times it appears VoIP deployments are maintaining a good pace. The expense to deploy VoIP when measured over the operating expense ROI (using the existing ip network for interoffice calls, SIP Trunking, unified communications to streamline business processes) is still attractive. Regarding a VoIP security focus are we in the industry doing enough to emphasizing the need to secure VoIP? What can we do to improve getting the message across?

Yes, indeed, the VoIP Security Alliance has joined the Twittersphere with:

http://twitter.com/voipsa

Feel free to follow us there if you are a Twitter user. The primary reason we are on Twitter is so that Twitter users can follow whatever blog posts we post here on the Voice of VOIPSA blog. We’ve noticed over time on other sites (and in our own actions) that some folks prefer to be notified of new blog posts via Twitter versus a RSS feed. So now you have that choice. Subscribe via RSS or via Twitter. We’ll respond to tweets as well, of course, but our primary goal is to provide another way to consume VOIPSA content.

If you are on Twitter, please do feel free to follow us. Thanks.

Are you interesting in writing about VoIP security? In providing updates on security news? Product reviews? Threat analyses? Notes about recent security advisories?

Would you like your writing to appear on this blog?

As you have probably noticed, the frequency of our posting here in recent months has dropped a bit. It’s definitely not for lack of content… anyone subscribing to a Google Alert on “voip security” or subscribing to the VOIPSEC mailing list will know that there are definitely ongoing VoIP security issues. But we collectively haven’t been writing all that often about those issues here on this blog. Many reasons… but mostly that those of us who have been writing for the three years since we started this blog have just been finding ourselves insanely busy and not able to make the time to write here frequently. A couple of folks have moved into roles where they no longer work directly with VoIP security. Others have started their own blogs or just gone on to other things.

So we are looking to recharge the “Voice of VOIPSA” writing corps a bit. Our goal all along has been to make this site a portal for news and analysis about “VoIP security” in whatever form that may take. We are looking for people who might be willing to write short notes about news stories related to security of VoIP, Unified Communications, etc. We are also looking for people interested in writing longer pieces like some of the deep analyses we have posted here in the past.

VOIPSA’s overall mission is to raise the level of discussion about communication security issues in the IP space – and we’re looking for anyone who would like to help us in doing that through this blog.

The only major requirement we have for writers here is that any pieces must be vendor-neutral, i.e. we are not looking for people to write here about how their company’s product will solve all your security woes. We’re not a marketing site for either VoIP or security vendors. However, we do welcome posts from people at those companies that talk about the general state of the industry. We also welcome posts from folks who may not be at any company in the space but are just passionately interested in the topic.

If you are interested in writing for Voice of VOIPSA, please send me an email expressing your interest and providing some background about your connection to VoIP security. If you write at an existing weblog, even on a completely different topic, it would be helpful if you sent along that link as well.

Thanks for continuing to follow this site and after three years of blogging, we’re looking forward to continuing to provide you information and analysis about VoIP/communication security for the next three years… and beyond!

Technorati Tags:
voipsa, voip, voip security, voipsecurity, security, blogging

This is a neat trick. By doing a little up-front scanning and/or guesswork, an attacker can send an INVITE directly to a SIP user agent, causing the device to ring.  Then, when the user agent issues the BYE message to hang-up, the attacker can respond with a 407 Proxy authorization required message, causing the endpoint to then respond with it’s authentication credentials, essentially handing them directly to the attacker.

The page linked above indicates that this attack is currently implemented in the VoIP Pack for CANVAS, so it’s essentially packaged and ready to use for you CANVAS users.  You can see a video of this being used in CANVAS here.  I would expect to see this credential-harvesting attack in other exploitation frameworks or stand-alone tools shortly…

If you are a LinkedIn user (as I am), there is now a “UC Security” group that you can join. The description of the group is:

Unified Communications is blurring the boundaries between Voice, Video and Data networks. As such, security threats that used to be in islands are now easily traversing across the network boundaries. UC Security provides a forum for people to share the common security issues around UC.

I can see that several of the “usual characters” in our security circles are already members of the group.

As we mentioned back in July, there is also a VOIPSA group on LinkedIn which you are welcome to join as well.

I am still not personally entirely sold on the value of LinkedIn groups, but I do have to admit that some of the discussions have in fact been useful and interesting. If you are a LinkedIn user, you may want to check out these groups and join in the discussions (or at least promote the existence of the groups through having them on your LinkedIn profile).

Technorati Tags:
security, uc, unifiedcommunications, voip, voipsecurity, voipsa, linkedin

It appears that there is a new book out on VoIP security named, rather simply, “Voice over IP Security“. It’s from Cisco Press and written by a Patrick Park. I haven’t seen the book yet but ITworld has an interview with the author. Amazon.com of course has some user reviews as well.

Good to see additional books coming out into the field. It will be interesting to see how this compares to the others out there.

P.S. If you have the book and would be interested in writing a review for this site, please feel free to contact me.

Technorati Tags:
voip security, books, voip, cisco, security

Over the past three years, we’ve covered at great length the case of Edwin Pena and Robert Moore where Pena created a scheme where he apparently represented himself as a legitimate VoIP service provider – and then routed calls over other people’s networks. When last we left the story, Pena’s co-conspirator Robert Moore was sitting in jail while Pena was reportedly off somewhere in South American.

ComputerWorld now reports that Edwin Pena has been caught in Mexico and will be extradited back to the US. It will be interesting to see what, if any, new information turns up during his trial.

(Hat tip to Shawn Merdinger for passing along this link in the VOIPSEC mailing list.)

If you will be in Miami at ITEXPO February 2-4 you are welcome to attend a free “SIP Trunking And Security” session I (Dan York) will be doing as part of Ingate Systems’ SIP Trunking Workshops. The SIP trunking workshops are free to all attendees even if you only register for an exhibit pass.

My session will be 11:15-12:30 on Wednesday, February 3rd, and if you do attend please feel free to come up and introduce yourself (or drop me a note in advance to let me know to look out for you). I’ll be bringing my recording gear, too, and the talk will eventually go out in my Blue Box Podcast feed so you will be able to hear it later.

P.S. If you are attending ITEXPO and your company makes a product or provides a service related to VoIP security, please feel free to let me know and perhaps we can schedule an interview to go out as a Blue Box Special Edition.

Technorati Tags:
danyork, itexpo, miami, voipsa, voip security, sip trunking, sip, sip security, security